The List: 29 Mar 2001 (Issue 410)

Why get excited about strange phenomena when ordinary phenomena are exciting enough in the first place?

Consider for a moment that we are existent cognisant organisms fa-fa-fa- floating around in space on the surface of a suitably cooled orb of dense matter orbiting a very hot sun, the most powerful radiator in the universe at just exactly a right distance, an absolutely so right distance, for it to be warm enough to start and maintain life and prevail as a luscious and diverse geoculture with the frozen windswept Scandinavian peaks and the seeringly parched scorching hot desert basins of the Kalahari.

And consider the human in among all this, advanced beyond simply wrapping furs around his body: wearing a Gore-tex climbing outfit that is cut on the bias, and he meets another human being on the summit and they stand there breathless and rasping and aweing down on to the surface of the earth that at that point is spread out below them, and imagine how good they feel, to be an organism with eyes to see and skin to sense and lungs to draw and then imagine how much more excited they might be to find out they had the same birthday.

We have the bone-sweeping swayings of pure joy and excitement and the potential for our whole body to vibrate and shudder with an energy out of our control and people are uplifted when they see one of their numbers in a doorway.

Consider that there are folk taking time out of office work to gather late in the night around a fire, to sketch and write about what they hope for in life, to make ritual and chanting and to co-ponder the universe in its relations to them and to spread that roaring fire down with rakes and walk merrily over and over the burning hot embers while so many more are getting a double episode of Sex And The City.

There are people teaching hang-gliding in the tropics and there are people who have alien abduction insurance policies.

Are there people alive who claim to have part of their body missing due to spontaneous combustion? Do they like a nice rich gravy? The taste all magnificent around the side of their tongue, salty and with wine? Supped up with warm bread?

Nut thing i knew, I was on board this flying saucer with all these aliens... We Flew ﬁght into Spare

How did you get back?

WOW, you jamrﬂg 50d? 1 "'1" A :35? lomlg had a Five pound lt must’ve been brilliant .’ E

Are there people who are failing to meet their true love because their horoscope threw them into a strange state of mind and they decide not to go out this night?

Phenomenism is the doctrine that phenomena are the sole material of knowledge. I like it. Like the idea that all the stuff that can be explained is not in fact the stuff of knowledge and that we are truly informed by events and things we cannot explain; yes, that maybe 'informed' is therefore not about simply having facts at tips but being shaped, having consciousness

formed, at those moments of simply experiencing amazing things.

And so i am engrossed in the fact that we even have a world to

be conscious in that i can get nothing more from certain

phenomena and i have never seen anything that i could explain as non-earthly in its consciousness. Nothing that wasn't of our nature, and yet i have seen plenty i cannot explain. Try explaining why Aurora Borealis are actually nice. Neil Young Chords. Roseotto.

We have to use these as standards of the spectacular and the

reason we can is because that quality of beauty is shared and r. communal and believed to be so, and that is true knowledge. It seems that people are trying to stretch out new realities to match the amazingness of their minds' imaginations . . . Perhaps people don’t want to think that this life is it, that this is all, that they

Are there peOple alive who claim to have part of their body missing due to spontaneous combustion?

are gone then for an ever when their body has died. If you believe in enjoying past lives now and being able to go into them, then this would fill that possible void.

And unidentified flying objects are part of a set of things that i cannot get into until i see them. Like i can’t get too excited about a flavour until i taste it.

I hear there is a lot of lovely countryside around Bonnybridge, and a lovely bridge and there are children there laughing and whistling and skipping on their part of the surface of this spinning orb which has suitably cooled down so as not to burn their little feet.

That is enough for me.

Weli', ! was running away wile“ l ’e’t. Mgreli being beamed up in a fag or («3%